Tag Archives: Lincoln Center Theater

HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Polyamory is front and center in Sarah Ruhl’s HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE (photo by Kyle Froman)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through May 7, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

“I think in the polyamory movement, you sort of just — accept — the person’s sexual predilections,” Jane (Robin Weigert) says early on in Sarah Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. “Is it a movement now?” Paul (Omar Metwally) asks. “I think so. There’s a book — called The Ethical Slut. It tells you how to do it,” Michael (Brian Hutchison) replies (referring to an actual book). Two New Jersey couples learn quite a lesson about the “movement” when a polyamorous triad comes over for New Year’s Eve in this extremely clever play, running at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse through May 7. Married breeders Jane and Michael and George (Marisa Tomei) and Paul are best friends, but they’re not exactly Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. When legal aid lawyer Jane tells the others about a polyamorous temp in her office who lives with two men and slaughters her own meat, they all decide that they have to meet. So on New Year’s Eve in a quaint suburban home, the beautiful, free-spirited Pip (Lena Hall), brash mathematician David (Austin Smith), and stoned slacker Freddie (David McElwee) discuss hunting, Pythagoras, music theory, Twelfth Night, “radical honesty,” impenetrable pistachios, harmony, and mermaids over vegan hash brownies that soon have Jane, Michael, George, and Paul so enraptured with the alluring Pip that they’re ready to do just about anything with her and her two lovers — but they’re not prepared for what they have to face the next morning, and potentially the rest of their lives.

Lena Hall stars as a polyamorous ingénue in new Sarah Ruhl play at Lincoln Center (photo by Kyle Froman)

As the audience enters the theater, a skinned animal hangs from the ceiling of David Zinn’s living-room set. A woman, whom we later learn is Pip, walks up to the sacrificial object, takes it down, and carries it offstage, cradling it like it’s a baby. It’s an apt metaphor for what follows, as the conventional world of straight married couples gets butchered, in a way. Paul is an architect relegated to bathroom renovation. George (short for Georgia) became a junior high school teacher instead of getting her PhD in classics. Michael used to be in a rock band but now writes jingles. And Jane regrets losing what she once was. “Life with a teenager is a series of reprimands until your personality disappears,” she says. Believing they’re all stuck in a rut, they are fascinated by the seemingly carefree world that Pip, David (pronounced dah-VEED), and Freddie live in, even if they don’t understand it. “Our language is limited and so our imagination is limited,” David explains, referring to most of humanity. George is particularly ready to break out; she wants to sing “Wild Thing” and compares the New Year’s Eve party to the “wild rumpus” in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, telling the audience directly, “It was dirty but I felt sort of gloriously clean.” George and Paul and Michael and Jane might have thought they were happy, but Pip represents a spirituality that has evaded them. (Even the brand name of the bow George uses in the forest is Spirit.) Pip is studying to be a body worker, but she gets inside people’s minds as well, with a touch of magic.

Two couples deal with the fall-out from a crazy New Year’s Eve party in HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE (photo by Kyle Froman)

“Really polyamory takes all the fun out of adultery,” Paul says playfully, but two-time Pulitzer finalist Ruhl (Stage Kiss, In the Next Room or the vibrator play) digs much deeper than that relatively simplistic aside. Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman (Marie Antoinette, The Oldest Boy), who have previously collaborated on Stage Kiss, The Clean House, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and Orlando, neither defend nor attack polyamory while dealing with such issues as personal and familial responsibility, shame, and sexuality throughout one’s life. The cast is uniformly strong, but Tony winner Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kinky Boots) does the heavy lifting with an infectious lightness; in order for the play to work, the audience must fall in love with her just as all the characters do, and she makes it nearly impossible not to be drawn into her youthful enthusiasm. The second act is much darker than the first and sometimes goes astray, particularly when Pip takes George hunting and things don’t turn out quite as planned, and thank goodness the show doesn’t immediately end after Michael sings one of his songs. Ruhl still has a bit more to say, bringing it all back home with a sweetly meaningful finale.

THE BABYLON LINE

Teacher Aaron Port (Josh Radnor) and student Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser) get on board THE BABYLON LINE at Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 22, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

The first words of Richard Greenberg’s latest play, The Babylon Line, are “The End,” referencing both the end of life and what might be the end of the literary dreams of Aaron Port (Josh Radnor), who then quotes Walter Benjamin: “Death sanctions all stories.” Unfortunately, the end of The Babylon Line can’t come quite soon enough. It’s 1967, and the thirty-eight-year-old Aaron, who has had one short story published, has been reduced to teaching an adult education Creative Writing class in Levittown for a trio of yentas who were disappointed that Contemporary Events and Politics, Flower Arranging, and French Cooking were already full, plus a drug-addled former valedictorian, a shell-shocked Korean War veteran, and a woman who apparently has stepped right out of a Tennessee Williams play. A reverse commuter who lives in Greenwich Village, Aaron takes the train from Penn Station to Wantagh for the class, managing to net fifteen bucks a week. At first he has little interest in teaching or in his odd students until southern belle Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser), who like him feels like an outsider, awakens a long-subdued passion in him. While Jack Hassenpflug (Frank Wood) keeps reworking his brief war memory and Marc Adams (Michael Oberholtzer) can’t say much more than hello, Frieda Cohen (Randy Graff), Midge Braverman (Julie Halston), and Anna Cantor (Maddie Corman as a character who has previously appeared in Greenberg’s Everett Beekin and Our Mother’s Brief Affair) gossip about the other students and Mr. Levitt, the founder of Levittown, forming a kind of Hadassah chorus. “I’m very excited about your potential,” Aaron hesitatingly tells the class, but not only doesn’t he mean it, he’s also sarcastically referring to his own potential, which he sees fading away fast. As Joan later remarks, “Levittown is not where people generally come seeking opportunities.”

Aaron (Josh Radnor) faces his creative writing class, and himself, in new Richard Greenberg play

Just as Aaron is bored with what his life has become, it’s hard to get excited about The Babylon Line. The format, framed by the memories of eighty-six-year-old Aaron examining a major part of his life nearly half a century earlier, plays out more like a short story than a fully realized theatrical work; it has some intriguing elements and a handful of fine moments, but it can’t sustain its 140-minute length (with intermission). Coincidentally, Greenberg (Take Me Out, The Assembled Parties), who was raised in East Meadow, has recently released Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions, a book that consists of fifty short stories, most of which run fewer than ten pages. Awkwardly directed by Terry Kinney (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, reasons to be pretty) on Richard Hoover’s basic schoolroom set, the play also never quite captures the Long Island feel of the title; while there are references to suburbia, it lacks the rhythm of that oft-heard poem: “Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst, and Babylon.” Originally produced by New York Stage and Film in 2014 and running at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse, The Babylon Line is one class, or train, you won’t mind missing.

SHOWS FOR DAYS

Phones become key for an unexpected reason in Douglas Carter Beane’s SHOWS FOR DAYS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 23, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Two-time Tony-winning diva Patti LuPone pulls off a little magical sleight of hand in Douglas Carter Beane’s otherwise slight memory play, Shows for Days. On the night I saw it, the stage diva, playing a stage diva, exited a scene in the second act by reaching out to an audience member; although it looked like a celebratory handshake or a low high-five, it turned out that LuPone had swiped away the woman’s cell phone, without most of the crowd, including me, noticing it. Only the next day did the story come out and deservedly go viral, following in the footsteps of the Long Island oaf who tried to charge his phone in a fake socket on the set of Hand to God. LuPone’s performance is the best thing about Beane’s play, based on his experiences as a fourteen-year-old boy from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, who hooked up with Jane Simmon Miller’s Genesius Theatre in Reading, a local company that is still at it. Michael Urie (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Buyer & Cellar) stars as Car, a shy teenager seeking more out of his dull suburban life. He wanders into the Prometheus Theatre one day and is almost immediately put to work by gruff bull dyke Sid (Dale Soules), the theater’s cofounder and production manager; by the time he meets the rest of the crew — needy actress Maria (Zoë Winters), oversized African American queen Clive (Lance Coadie Williams), sexy blonde hottie Damien (Jordan Dean), and Irene (LuPone), an Actress worthy of a capital A — he has found the second home he has been looking for. Unfortunately, not everything he discovers makes for compelling, entertaining theater for the rest of us.

Lincoln Center has assembled quite a remarkable creative team for Shows for Days. In addition to Beane (The Nance, The Little Dog Laughed), there’s director Jerry Zaks (Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves), set designer John Lee Beatty Sets (Other Desert Cities, The Most Happy Fella), costume designer William Ivey Long (On the Twentieth Century, Chicago), lighting designer Natasha Katz (The Coast of Utopia, The Glass Menagerie), and sound designer Leon Rothenberg (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Nance); among them, they have earned a mound of Tony nominations and awards. The narrative, clunky at times, has Car going back and forth between 1973 Reading and 2015 Lincoln Center; the modern-day moments feel more like vanity scenes that aren’t really necessary. When the play focuses on the nitty-gritty aspects of community theater, a motley crew attempting to put on the best possible production with extremely limited resources, Shows for Days has a sweet charm, even though the characters are stereotypes. It’s fun watching them decide how they are going to approach an evening of Tennessee Williams one-acts. But when the plot explores romantic hanky-panky, it loses its focus and becomes far less interesting. The more real the play feels, the better it is, even as the props are revealed to be fake. When the 2015 Car first enters the Prometheus, he says, “Curtained off by the entrance is the tiniest of offices. Desk. A chair. All found in the street. With a telephone — that somehow still works.” He picks up the old rotary phone, showing the audience that it is not connected to anything, yet it soon rings, and Sid speaks into it. It’s a gag that is sure to get a different kind of laugh now, after the events of July 9, when a cell phone made Shows for Days the talk of the town. It’s too bad it couldn’t reach that level of fame for other reasons.

THE KING AND I

Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe get to know each other in Bartlett Sher’s wonderful revival at Lincoln Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 3, $97-$172
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

In December 1977, my parents took the whole family to Broadway to see a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, with Yul Brynner returning as King Mongkut of Siam and Constance Towers playing Anna Leonowens, a British schoolteacher hired by the royal leader to teach English and Western culture to his children as he tries to modernize his country, later known as Thailand. It was my introduction to the Broadway musical in person, not a bad way to begin. So it was with fond memories that I entered Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater recently to see this latest revival, and I’m happy to report that everything you’ve heard about it is correct; it’s a memorable experience from start to finish, a delightful staging loaded with charm and elegance. Based on Margaret Landon’s 1944 novel, Anna and the King of Siam, a fictionalized version of actual events, the musical gets under way with a lovely overture; the small orchestra, under the direction of Ted Sperling, is in the pit, visible below long wooden slats stretching out in front of the stage. But at the end of the fanfare, the stage floor extends over the musicians, the curtain opens, and a nearly impossibly large, spectacular ship approaches the audience, carrying Anna (six-time Tony nominee Kelli O’Hara) and her young son, Louis (Jake Lucas), as they pull into Bangkok. Captain Orton (Murphy Guyer) warns Anna not to anger Kralahome (Paul Nakauchi), the king’s prime minister, but the widow immediately shows that she is not afraid of anything, speaking her mind when she learns that she and Louis will be staying at the palace instead of the separate house she was promised. And upon meeting the king (Ken Watanabe), who has a vast number of wives and children, she quickly demonstrates that she is a strong, fearless woman, not about to tolerate treatment as a second-class citizen. In addition to giving lessons to the kids, including the crown prince, Chulalongkorn (Jon Viktor Corpuz), Anna is soon teaching the king a thing or two as well as he seeks to make tiny Siam a major player in the modern world. Meanwhile, the newest member of his harem, Tuptim (Ashley Park), a gift from the king of Burma, is secretly in love with Lun Tha (Conrad Ricamora), a clandestine romance that could get them both killed.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s THE KING AND I dazzles in every way at the Vivian Beaumont (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Director Bartlett Sher, who helmed Lincoln Center’s celebrated 2008 production of South Pacific — which earned seven Tonys, including Best Director of a Musical and Best Revival of a Musical, as well as a nomination for O’Hara’s featured performance as Nellie Forbush — has done another sparkling job with The King and I, inviting the audience to bask in the glow of Richard Rodgers’s glorious music and Oscar Hammerstein III’s exquisite book and lyrics. Once the ship departs, Michael Yeargan’s sets are much more spare yet graceful, allowing Catherine Zuber’s sumptuous costumes to shine. The songs are, well, as wonderful as ever, from “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” and “Shall We Dance?” to “Getting to Know You,” “A Puzzlement,” and, natch, “Something Wonderful.” “The March of Siamese Children,” in which the king’s progeny from his favorite wives bow to him, one at a time, then greet Anna, as their mothers watch closely, hoping their children don’t do anything to hurt their status, is particularly effective, not only in its stellar execution but in displaying the old-fashioned ways of the king, which he must overcome if Siam is to thrive internationally. The issue of slavery is raised quite specifically in the second-act ballet “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a special presentation, based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for an important British diplomat (Edward Baker-Duly) who is interested in Anna. The show manages to sidestep issues of colonialism and ethnocentricity as Anna criticizes many of Siam’s traditions and her relationship with the king grows more intimate.

Lady Thiang (Ruthie Ann Miles) and Anna Leonewens (Kelli O’Hara) come together despite living very different lives (photo by Paul Kolnik)

O’Hara (The Light in the Piazza, Nice Work If You Can Get It) is enchanting as Anna, a role previously played by the likes of Celeste Holm, Hayley Mills, Faith Prince, Maureen McGovern, and Marie Osmond, giving her a fierce, determined edge while letting her vocal cords soar. (Irene Dunne played Anna in John Cromwell’s 1946 film, Anna and the King of Siam, which also starred Rex Harrison as the king and Lee J. Cobb as Kralahome.) Watanabe (Letters from Iwo Jima, Inception) is a certifiable triumph in a role that might be associated with one actor more than any other role — Brynner played the part more than 4,600 times onstage over the course of thirty-four years, winning two Tonys, while also earning an Oscar for the 1956 film and starring in the 1972 television series Anna and the King with Samantha Eggar. Bare-chested and with a shaven head, Watanabe is utterly engaging as the king, his choppy English adding a nice touch to his depiction of the complex ruler, whether declaring that life is a puzzlement, gleefully exclaiming, “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” or sweeping across the floor with Anna. (Just for the record, among the other actors who have portrayed the king in various incarnations, both musical and not, are Farley Granger, Lou Diamond Phillips, Zachary Scott, Herbert Lom, Darren McGavin, and Rudolf Nureyev.) Christopher Gattelli’s choreography, based on Jerome Robbins’s original, keeps things flowing beautifully, accompanying Robert Russell Bennett’s lush orchestrations. The original production won all five of the Tony Awards it was nominated for back in 1952 — Brynner as Best Featured Actor, Gertrude Lawrence for Best Leading Actress as Anna, Best Costume Design, Best Scenic Design, and Best Musical — while the revival I saw as a kid earned Drama Desk nominations for Brynner, Angela Lansbury as Anna, and Outstanding Musical. Lincoln Center’s revival is another runaway hit, garnering nine Tony nominations and two Drama Desk nods. It’s an absolute treat getting to know The King and I all over again.

THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX

Two generations deal with love, sex, and food in Lincoln Center production (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 26, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex explores the many facets of the title concepts in light but smart ways, touching on the complicated nature of friendship and family, romance and lust. Friends since they were nine years old, Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) and Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) are now going to the same Virginia college not far from where they were raised, and they have invited her parents, Lucinda (Diane Lane) and Howard (Tony Shalhoub), to come over for what Lucinda quickly decides is a “bohemian” dinner, on a makeshift table with salad, bread, no chairs, and cheap wine. While Lucinda gets right into the spirit of things, Howard has much more trouble, beginning with attempting to sit on the floor, then trying to serve himself some food. Soon the talk turns to the relationship between Jonny, a young black man with a sick mother, and Charlotte, a young Jewish woman preparing her own way in the world. Howard, a successful writer of detective fiction, might have been treating Jonny like a member of the family for the past decade, but now that he thinks that Jonny might become an official part of the family, he is not so happy. But the kids are still teenagers with their whole lives in front of them, and their undefined relationship grows more puzzling when Jonny starts dating another woman — and Charlotte says she has the hots for a fellow coed. Things heat up even further when the four main characters start debating such issues as racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, religion — and food. (The show features a lot of eating, so you might want to be sure to dine beforehand.) The second act takes place five years later, as some matters have been settled, but most have not, as marriage and divorce enter the conversation.

Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) and Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) contemplate their future in THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Returning to New York theater for the first time since 1977, when she was twelve, the now fifty-year-old Lane (A Little Romance, Unfaithful) is resplendent as Lucinda, her smile lighting up the entire theater, along with her rich southern accent, her character’s flair for life infectious. Shalhoub (Act One, Golden Boy) is terrific as Howard, a bundle of nerves and deeply hidden prejudices who fumbles fantastically in the opening dinner scene, showing a riotous mastery of physical comedy, while standing firm later when he gets into it with Jonny. Athie and Rankin are fine as Jonny and Charlotte, the former timid and withdrawn, the latter energetic and fancy-free, but the play slows down considerably when Lane and Shalhoub are not onstage. One of the busiest directors in New York, Sam Gold, who has helmed such delights as Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses, and Seminar, makes good use of the small Newhouse stage, keeping things moving proficiently on Andrew Lieberman’s minimalist sets, which generally consist of a few pieces of furniture and long drapes in the back. Doran, who has written such other plays as Kin and Nest and for such cable series as Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex, has a gift for creating unpredictable situations and taking them further than expected with a smooth calm, although she is occasionally too clever for her own good. The Mystery of Love and Sex is a perfectly pleasant piece of theater, a tasty morsel if not quite the gourmet meal it attempts to be.

THE OLDEST BOY

A lama (James Saito), a mother (Celia Keenan-Bolger), and a monk (Jon Norman Schneider) sip Tibetan butter tea in THE OLDEST BOY

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 28, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Inspired by a true story told to her by her children’s Tibetan babysitter, playwright Sarah Ruhl explores motherhood, Buddhism, and monastic tradition in The Oldest Boy. Three-time Tony nominee Celia Keenan-Bolger (The Glass Menagerie, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) stars as a Cincinnati-born mother who is surprised when a monk (Jon Norman Schneider) and a lama (James Saito) arrive at her home (in an unnamed American city), claiming that her three-year-old son is the living reincarnation of the monk’s beloved teacher. Both she and her husband (James Yaegashi) — a Buddhist owner of a Tibetan restaurant who was born and raised in India, where the Dalai Lama and many Tibetans have lived in exile since the Chinese army crushed the 1959 Tibetan uprising — are honored that their child might be a tulku, or reincarnated Rinpoche. However, they face a dilemma, for the monk and the lama have come to take the boy to be enthroned in Dharamsala, where he will study in a monastery and become a Rinpoche himself, the teacher now being taught by his student in the endless circle of life. While the thought of giving up her son is shocking to the mother, the father is much more accepting of the situation, as it is part of his family’s culture.

A mother has an impossible decision to make in Sarah Ruhl’s THE OLDEST BOY

The Oldest Boy is set on a round wooden floor that evokes a mandala. Two-time Pulitzer finalist Ruhl (The Clean House, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) and director Rebecca Taichman (Ruhl’s Stage Kiss and Orlando) open up the back wall of the Mitzi Newhouse, where performers enact symbolic rituals that highlight Tibetan culture but detract from the central narrative, more David Henry Hwang than Sarah Ruhl. Keenan-Bolger and Schneider are both excellent, their difficult relationship wholly believable. The boy is portrayed by a wooden puppet operated by Takemi Kitamura, Nami Yamamoto, and Ernest Abuba, with Abuba providing the speaking voice. It’s a conceit that is odd and uncomfortable at first but ends up working rather well. Also influenced by such documentaries as Unmistaken Child and My Reincarnation, The Oldest Boy is a moving, if uneven, portrait of faith and family, of the value of belief and tradition in the modern world.

BROADWAY IN HD: THE NANCE

Stagecast of THE NANCE starring Nathan Lane comes to Symphony Space as part of Broadway in HD series (photo by Joan Marcus)

Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
June 25 & 30, July 14 & 20, $23, 7:00
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.screenvision.com

Miss a big show because tickets were too expensive or too hard to get or the production took place overseas? Screenvision is now offering a second chance to check out select Broadway, Canadian, and British plays by showing them in movie theaters across the country. Earlier this month, the company, which specializes in movie-theater advertising, presented a filmed version of the Australian production of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, starring Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones. Now, in conjunction with Gay Pride Week, Screenvision and Broadway on Screen have teamed up with Lincoln Center Theater to present a stagecast of last year’s Broadway hit The Nance, Douglas Carter Beane’s poignant and engaging tale of a police clampdown on gay subculture in 1930s New York City. In the play, directed by Jack O’Brien (The Coast of Utopia, Much Ado About Nothing), Tony nominee Nathan Lane stars as Chauncey, a closeted burlesque performer who is trying to avoid getting arrested while picking up younger men in specific meeting points. The show also stars Andréa Burns, Jenni Barber, and Cady Huffman as a trio of strippers, Lewis J. Stadlen as Chauncey’s onstage partner, and Jonny Orsini as a one-night stand who turns into something more. The Nance will be screening June 25 & 30 and July 14 & 20 at 7:00 at Symphony Space as part of the Broadway in HD series, which also includes a June 24 showing of Christopher Plummer and Nikki M. James (The Book of Mormon, Les Misérables) in the 2008 Stratford Festival production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra. In addition, Symphony Space will be screening the current revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s A Small Family Business on June 26 & 29 and July 9 & 17 as part of its ongoing National Theatre Live series.